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“Holy f—king s—t!” someone in the audience exclaimed after one character, a single mom played by America Ferrera, spoke to the Barbies about the contradictions and constraints that make being a woman so impossible. The game is rigged, Ferrera’s character says, with women bending over backwards to fit into the increasingly tiny space between “not enough” and “too much” when it comes to gender performance, beauty, confidence and motherhood. After the profane outburst, a clear and sincere expression of incredulity that this was happening in a Barbie movie, came a powerful eruption of applause from the audience.
Voiced in that forcible staccato of claps and whoops was frustration: about the end of the constitutional right to abortion; about the massive wave of anti-trans legislation sweeping through the country; about trying to be a person within a heteropatriarchal culture that strives to keep all of us in strict categories that we never asked to enter.
I want to be clear: “Barbie” is a political film. Last week, Fox News’ wary pundits suspected there would be “a woke element or two” snuck into the film, but I predict that right-wing culture warriors will find no end of opportunities to feel victimized by it in the coming days. Misogyny and men’s rights activism are exposed as paltry solutions to men’s emotional needs! Barbieland’s Supreme Court are all Barbies! A trans woman simply exists!
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the “Barbie” movie “revolutionary” — a two-hour-long commercial can only do so much — but its distillation of how the gender binary can so often be a limiting factor in our lives is a much-needed salve in times like these.
Key to the success of Barbie is the figure of the bimbo. Anyone who’s ever heard a “dumb blonde” joke knows what that’s all about: The bimbo is, to put it crassly, stupid, frivolous and hot. In the 2000s, bimbos like Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith were hypersexual clowns; in 2016, presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump famously called Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly a bimbo. For a long time, bimboness, and the vision of hyperfeminine beauty associated with it, was a vulgar concept. And yet it has been embraced by a younger generation of people in recent years as a performance that highlights the fragility of gender.
It’s a form of political camp, says A.P. Pierce, a media scholar who has followed the bimbo movement on TikTok for the past three years.
Since 2020, there has been a flood of videos on “BimboTok” depicting young blondes in revealing feminine clothing and elaborate makeup, cooing about how hot they feel in one breath, then speaking out about patriarchy in the next.
“One of these forces that pushes people into bimbodom is that compulsory navigation of, ‘Well, are you going to be this kind of girl or are you going to be this kind of girl?’ ” Pierce told me. But instead of “girlbossing” or twisting themselves into impossible standards of respectability, TikTok bimbos are opting out of all that, Pierce told me, and using the idea of being “too much” to say something pointed about gender’s artificial boundaries.
As someone with admittedly no personal interest in bimbo culture, that conversation with Pierce has nevertheless stuck with me since we spoke. I spent so much of my life resenting the invisible lines that divided people, measuring us against seemingly arbitrary standards of how we were supposed to be according to our genitalia. And I still struggle to forgive my past self, a teenager falling in line with the dominant culture and reflexively dismissing “girly girls” — in other words, bimbos — for being empty-headed, dull and uninterested in women’s rights.
With buckets of pink paint and a 64-year-old archive of dolls at its disposal, the Barbie movie takes a crack at healing everyone who struggles with the gender binary, whether it’s cis men craving human connection, women feeling trapped by unrealistic expectations, or nonbinary people wanting to be seen and understood.
In “Barbie,” both Barbies and Kens face a mutual reckoning with gender, finding a new way to be that recognizes the wholeness of their personhood.
If plastic toys can get there, perhaps we can, too.
Barbie obliterates all of America’s silliest arguments about gender norms
The sold-out special screening of the Barbie movie on Thursday night at the Kabuki was riotous, with attendees of all genders sporting glossy pink cowboy boots, bleached blonde hair and glittery handbags. Some wore pastel-pink spacesuits while others opted for the wide, tutu-like silhouettes popularized by designer Betsey Johnson. It’s not what one might typically wear to a mass, old-style feminist consciousness-raising session, but as the movie progressed, the theater sizzled with a similar energy.“Holy f—king s—t!” someone in the audience exclaimed after one character, a single mom played by America Ferrera, spoke to the Barbies about the contradictions and constraints that make being a woman so impossible. The game is rigged, Ferrera’s character says, with women bending over backwards to fit into the increasingly tiny space between “not enough” and “too much” when it comes to gender performance, beauty, confidence and motherhood. After the profane outburst, a clear and sincere expression of incredulity that this was happening in a Barbie movie, came a powerful eruption of applause from the audience.
Voiced in that forcible staccato of claps and whoops was frustration: about the end of the constitutional right to abortion; about the massive wave of anti-trans legislation sweeping through the country; about trying to be a person within a heteropatriarchal culture that strives to keep all of us in strict categories that we never asked to enter.
I want to be clear: “Barbie” is a political film. Last week, Fox News’ wary pundits suspected there would be “a woke element or two” snuck into the film, but I predict that right-wing culture warriors will find no end of opportunities to feel victimized by it in the coming days. Misogyny and men’s rights activism are exposed as paltry solutions to men’s emotional needs! Barbieland’s Supreme Court are all Barbies! A trans woman simply exists!
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the “Barbie” movie “revolutionary” — a two-hour-long commercial can only do so much — but its distillation of how the gender binary can so often be a limiting factor in our lives is a much-needed salve in times like these.
Key to the success of Barbie is the figure of the bimbo. Anyone who’s ever heard a “dumb blonde” joke knows what that’s all about: The bimbo is, to put it crassly, stupid, frivolous and hot. In the 2000s, bimbos like Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith were hypersexual clowns; in 2016, presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump famously called Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly a bimbo. For a long time, bimboness, and the vision of hyperfeminine beauty associated with it, was a vulgar concept. And yet it has been embraced by a younger generation of people in recent years as a performance that highlights the fragility of gender.
It’s a form of political camp, says A.P. Pierce, a media scholar who has followed the bimbo movement on TikTok for the past three years.
Since 2020, there has been a flood of videos on “BimboTok” depicting young blondes in revealing feminine clothing and elaborate makeup, cooing about how hot they feel in one breath, then speaking out about patriarchy in the next.
“One of these forces that pushes people into bimbodom is that compulsory navigation of, ‘Well, are you going to be this kind of girl or are you going to be this kind of girl?’ ” Pierce told me. But instead of “girlbossing” or twisting themselves into impossible standards of respectability, TikTok bimbos are opting out of all that, Pierce told me, and using the idea of being “too much” to say something pointed about gender’s artificial boundaries.
As someone with admittedly no personal interest in bimbo culture, that conversation with Pierce has nevertheless stuck with me since we spoke. I spent so much of my life resenting the invisible lines that divided people, measuring us against seemingly arbitrary standards of how we were supposed to be according to our genitalia. And I still struggle to forgive my past self, a teenager falling in line with the dominant culture and reflexively dismissing “girly girls” — in other words, bimbos — for being empty-headed, dull and uninterested in women’s rights.
With buckets of pink paint and a 64-year-old archive of dolls at its disposal, the Barbie movie takes a crack at healing everyone who struggles with the gender binary, whether it’s cis men craving human connection, women feeling trapped by unrealistic expectations, or nonbinary people wanting to be seen and understood.
In “Barbie,” both Barbies and Kens face a mutual reckoning with gender, finding a new way to be that recognizes the wholeness of their personhood.
If plastic toys can get there, perhaps we can, too.
ombine a obnoxious bored child, a lit grill, a barbie doll and no parental supervision for 5 minutes and barbie will be getting a fiery sendoff to the hereafter. 
